(Natural News) Earlier this week, a report noted that as AT&T finalized its purchase of Time Warner, executives were considering selling off some of the purchased companies assets, including celebrity news website TMZ and fake news outlet CNN, the latter of which has taken a beating in the ratings for months.

AT&T Entertainment Group chief John Stankey put the kibosh on that story a couple of days later, claiming that no, CNN won't be auctioned off because it's too valuable. "It would be a strategically missed opportunity if we weren't in that business" of breaking news, he told The Hollywood Reporter, as noted by Newsmax.

Okay, we don't really know if CNN is on the chopping block post AT&T — Time Warner merger or not. But what we do know is that the network has a penchant for publishing and broadcasting fake news about the Trump administration — even to the point of having to retract stories because they were so wrong.

Rather, it's much more likely that recent decisions by Google and YouTube to target "conspiracy theories" under new 'quality control' policies will be used to target legitimate reporting by independent and alternative media sources when such stories challenge far-Left orthodoxy or embarrass Left-wing Democrats and their sycophantic allies.

The latest update to its rating guidelines brings many changes, but the biggest are focused on conspiracy theory websites and query results in the non-English language and satirical pages that don't make it clearly known they are satire.

Earlier, Google updated their guidelines to include additional controversial changes, to classify what "offensive, upsetting, inaccurate and hateful web pages" consist of. As even more changes are rolled out, it is becoming obvious to many that the site is attempting to curb the free flow of information based on arbitrary definitions as to what does and does not constitute "real" information.

Earlier this year, when Google temporarily (and arbitrarily) blocked search access to all Natural News content, site founder and editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, criticized the power and control the Web's biggest search engine possessed.

"In this way, Google has raised digital book burning to a whole new level of efficiency only dreamed of by fascists of the Third Reich. Now, an entire library of human knowledge can be obliterated in an instant, with no justification, no warning and no recourse," he wrote at NewsCartels.com.